By Riyad A. Shahjahan I love writing conceptual pieces. Such pieces help surface the questions or disconnections I feel as I am impacted by real events in the world. It’s like cooking my favorite dishes and tasting the distillation of flavors after a long arduous process. Yet, the process is always messy and tends to be a journey plagued with inadequacy. “Persuading an octopus in a jar” (p. 181) emerged as one powerful image in…
By Riyad A. Shahjahan A couple of years ago, a doctoral advisee was at the crossroads of what he could explore for his future dissertation. During the meeting, my brilliant Michigan State University colleague, Lynn Fendler, asked: “what kind of methodological lifestyle do you want to live? Do you see yourself engaged in talking to people? Do you see yourself analyzing images?” Lynn basically suggested going beyond the usual linear approach: reading the literature, developing…
By Michelle Boyd So my brother and I are hanging out with his 2-year old goddaughter a few weeks ago. She’s the kind of kid who, as he points out, smiles not just with her face, but with her whole body. At the moment, her smile is trained on a plush, kid-sized, easy chair. Which, she has just discovered, can be tipped upside down into a little triangle, so that it doubles as a soft-sided…
By Yuki Imoto and Tomoko Tokunaga When we met in Tokyo in 2013, I (Tomoko) had just returned from the US as a postdoc, and I (Yuki) had started a faculty post in Japan. We connected through our common interests and shared backgrounds. We have been writing collaboratively since then. It was rare to find a friend who shared similar experiences of crisscrossing linguistic, cultural, and geographic borders. Our disciplinary backgrounds included anthropology, sociology, and…
By Kimine Mayuzumi Nowadays, I do my weekly reflection and planning on Friday, not on Sunday. I used to do it on Sunday evening after our kids going to bed. I set a timer for total 30 minutes, which helped me focus within the limited timeframe. The routine became a closure for the weekend. This worked well for the first couple of months. At some point, my weekly planning on Sunday evening became inconsistent and…
